Some time after completing this issues cover-story
interview with outgoing music impresario Bruce Montgomery, Samuel Hughes,
our senior editor, e-mailed that he was having second thoughts about the
title.After playing around,
inevitably, with several variations on The Full Monty, we had settled
on Monty in Full, which now seemed presumptuous, Sam wrote. Obviously,
no featureespecially one that is mostly a Q&A-style
interviewis ever going to capture anyone in full, let alone an
accomplished and complex character like Monty. But while I cant fill
in all the gaps, a few things that didnt get into my feature want mentioning.
A good place, he suggested, would be this column.In
August, Monty and the Gilbert & Sullivan Players of Philadelphia will
take his revival of the half-missing G & S opera, Thespis,
to the International Gilbert & Sullivan Festival in England; for that
one, he wrote an entire score, à la Sullivan, to accompany
W.S. Gilberts lyrics. After his 1963 Irish folk opera,
Spindrift, was performed by the Penn Singers and the Penn Players,
some Broadway-types like Harold Prince C48 Hon71 encouraged
him to write another musical. The result was The Amorous Flea,
which opened off-Broadway in 1964, and is still being performed sporadically
in theaters around the world. In 1972, he wrote An Orpheus Triptych
for the Orpheus Club of Philadelphia, a choral setting based on poems
to Orpheus by Apollonius Rhodius, Shakespeareand Monty. And of course
he has done many other works on commission, including his Academic
Festive Anthem for Penn. How he gets so much accomplished given
all his Penn responsibilities I dont know, but I do know that he
usually works until about five in the morning, and at 72 is still almost
impossibly energetic.Since
Ive already blown my cover of journalistic detachment, Ill just end
with this: I dont know when Ive met someone who combines such class,
wit and flair with such an amazingly positive, generous spirit.With
that buildup, then, turn to page 30 to learnif not all, then something
at leastabout Monty.Dr.
Nina Auerbach, the John Welsh Centennial Professor of History and Literature,
shares with Montgomery a taste for the outrageous, a larger-than-life,
theatrical quality. A leading Victorian scholar and writer on topics from
George Eliot to vampires, Auerbach was the subject of an exhaustive profile
in the Gazette a dozen years ago, in which she was described as
a highly complex system of contradictions. For this article, writer
Beth Kephart C82 visited Auerbach in her Rittenhouse Square apartment
to discuss her latest, surprising publishing projecta highly personal
appreciation of once-popular British writer Daphne du Maurier, now best
remembered for the movies Alfred Hitchcock made from her work, Rebecca
and The Birds. The book inaugurates a series from the University
of Pennsylvania Press called Personal Takes. (This is the first
Gazette appearance for Kephart, author of the National Book Award-nominated
memoir, A Slant of Sun;we were so pleased to have her in
the magazine that we asked her to write a book review, too.)Then
there are areas in which a little less color would be helpful,
where the extremes have largely taken over the stage. One is the highly
polarized debate pitting animal-rights advocates against scientific researchers
and the food industry. Stepping into this fray is the veterinary schools
fledgling Center for the Interaction of Animals and Society. In Saving
the Animal Planet, assistant editor Susan Lonkevich writes of the ambitious,
not to say quixotic, efforts of the centerwhich currently consists of
director Dr. James Serpell and a post-doctoral assistantto create a space
for reasoned dialogue on a subject where protesters in pig costumes stalking
the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile passes for a healthy exchange of views.